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Nicole Guarino:
Nobody wants to sign up for it, having the revenue number over your head. So it’s like, if you’re not gonna sign up for the risk at the same time, you know, it’s hard to reap the rewards too. Yeah. So

Josh Schachter:
John, what do you think about that? Where do you land on that, perennial debate of shell CS renew or not renew?

Jon Johnson:
I just wanna go to sales club. That’s it. That’s all I care about. I’m really just really excited on the Monday after thanks Thanksgiving? Halloween. I’ve been saying Thanksgiving all week after Halloween. Should we crash, everybody?

Josh Schachter:
Just gonna let you ramble for this episode, John. How about Rick? You wanna do a Ric Flair for us? Oh. Nicole?

Jon Johnson:
Okay. To kick things off, Josh, how many how many trick or treaters did you get this week this last week?

Josh Schachter:
I actually left, the so I wanted to go see what what, what was going on in the neighborhood. So we actually left a bowl of candy out in front of the apartment door. I mean, New York City when you got back? Most of it was gone. The super in my building could actually refill the refill the bowl, which is really nice. But here’s what I did, John, and this will not surprise you at all. So I printed out a little placard, a little, you know, 8 by 11. It said, hey, sorry. We’re out.

Josh Schachter:
Happy Halloween. And I put 2 bowls.

Jon Johnson:
And one

Josh Schachter:
of the bowls was regular sized candy bars, Twix, 3 Husketeers, like the real candy bars. People, you know, kids love those. The other bowl was, a bed of lettuce. I said happy Halloween. Pick one from either bowl. Pick one from either bowl.

Jon Johnson:
How much lettuce did you have left? There were

Josh Schachter:
a few there were a few, you know, flakes of lettuce. What what am I looking for?

Jon Johnson:
Flakes and, leaves?

Josh Schachter:
Thank you. Leaves of lettuce that were that were gone, actually. I don’t know who took those, but,

Jon Johnson:
that was

Josh Schachter:
my trick or treat in my very typical sarcastic humor. Okay. Anyway, we’re really excited today. We don’t have Christy here. We’ve got me and John bantering away, and then we’ve got Nicole Guarino. I I I hiccuped on that one. Nicole Guarino, I wanna say strong with pride. Yes.

Josh Schachter:
Who is the director of customer success at Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which is doing some really cool stuff. Very, very purpose driven company as I learned, in our our sync up previously. So, Nicole, thank you so much for being on this episode.

Jon Johnson:
Thank you for having me.

Josh Schachter:
Of course. Tell tell us a little bit about first of all, like, tell us a little bit about about, Cambridge Mobile Telematics just to get things started.

Nicole Guarino:
Yeah. So a little bit about us. We are the world’s, leading telematics solution provider. I feel like a lot of people probably don’t know what telematics is, but everybody knows who insurance companies are, and I guarantee you everybody has auto insurance. And all of your auto insurance, and these insurance companies have user based insurance. So that is like progressive has snapshot. You know, you download an app, you take drives, and you basically get rated as you drive. Like, State Farm has 1.

Nicole Guarino:
You know, a ton of customers. USAA has 1. And we are the telematics solution collecting the data and passing that back to insurance companies to make sure that we fairly rate how you drive.

Josh Schachter:
So you are the world’s greatest big brother of drivers, backseat driver effectively is what I just heard.

Nicole Guarino:
I’m in customer success, and I like to tell everyone, we’re not big brother. But

Josh Schachter:
I know. I know. I I I I joke. But but you but you Yeah. But you’ve got access to some cool data. So, you you had but you’re also very mission driven. So tell us a little bit about the mission of the company.

Nicole Guarino:
Sure. So our mission and really, what has started with our founders is ultimately to make the world and drivers safer. It’s mission driven because we ultimately started the company because we wanted to reduce distracted driving. Distracted driving has become, you know, the number one reason for casualty on the road. And so if you can teach people, like, basically, that their distraction has an ultimate consequence, if we can help people be less distracted on the road, we can ultimately make the world’s, road safer and driver safer. So that’s really where the mission and how we have been driven from the very beginning history.

Josh Schachter:
And and so 48% of casualties on the road are due to distracted driving. Is that right?

Nicole Guarino:
Correct. So those were we’ve had some recent studies, that we haven’t done, but, NAFTA is the company that does that sort of research. And they found that distracted driving is almost on par with drunk driving in terms of casualties and fatalities.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. It is true. As a parent of an 18 year old, who’s driving often these days, I appreciate the work that you’re doing. Yeah. So walk me through a little bit of how you got into this space. So we’re just kinda, like, looking through your your history with on LinkedIn. Like, what brought you in here? Was it the mission? Was it the opportunity? Was it the role? Give us a little bit of

Nicole Guarino:
that into it. Yeah. I’ve always been mission driven. I think if you, you know, check me out on LinkedIn, you’ll see, like, I started my career in sales. I was always that person in sales that got the tough accounts because I’m good at fixing problems, good at listening, good at solving, you know, customer issues and making sure that they like us again, which is great in customer success. But, you know, when you’re in sales, you’re just like, gosh. I just need an easy win here and there. You know, everything feels like this battle in sales.

Nicole Guarino:
And it was. And so when customer success really started becoming a thing, my husband is in sales and in SureTech. And, you know, not to age myself, but back in the day, it was like you were a sales road warrior. You were like, if you weren’t out on the road and traveling to meet your customers back then, you weren’t really being productive in sales. And we had 2 salespeople in a household, and we wanted a family and have kids. Someone had to be home. And around that time, customer success was really at its infancy. And I heard about it, and I was like, you know what? This seems to be, like, a great fit for me, based on what we do.

Nicole Guarino:
It’s the type of sales salesperson I was. So I made the jump, really into customer success. And I think I had started and it’s like, you know, client services, but then it it kinda it rebranded itself into customer success, I like to call it. So, that’s how I took the leap. How I got into CMT was I was looking for my next opportunity. My husband heard of you know, my husband being an insure tech his entire career had heard of CMT and had heard of the work that we were doing, and he was basically like, hey. That’s the kind of the next big thing in terms of rating for insurance. Like, I would definitely give them a you know, they recruited me, and so I took the leap over.

Nicole Guarino:
But as soon as I heard the mission, I’ve always been mission driven, I was sold. I loved it.

Josh Schachter:
And going back to the product for one second here before jumping straight to the CS thing, what’s, like, the number 1 or or or or maybe even some things that might surprise most folks that aren’t as educated on this with the inside baseball numbers? Like, what are the top, signals of behavior that will lead to an accident? Driving behavior?

Nicole Guarino:
Yeah. So heartbreaking is the number one indicator of whether or not

Josh Schachter:
Heart you I’m sorry. You said heartbreaking, like, you stole somebody’s heart or you you break hard. You break hard.

Jon Johnson:
You break hard.

Nicole Guarino:
Okay. Yeah. So you’re breaking too hard. Heartbreaking is the leading is probably one of the outside of distraction. So everyone knows that if you’re distracted and you’re, you know, distracted driving, like, that seems to be the obvious, but the unobvious one is heartbreaking. So it is the,

Josh Schachter:
that’s can measure in your in your telematics. Right? You can’t really can you measure distracted driving, or do you have the AI stuff out for that yet?

Nicole Guarino:
Yep. You can measure distracted driving. So distracted driving is actually the easiest one to measure.

Jon Johnson:
What?

Nicole Guarino:
Not that heartbreaking is hard, but, yeah, if you pick up your phone and you’re tapping and you have an app, we know that you’re using the app and we can tell what type of tapping events, you’re doing.

Josh Schachter:
Wait. How do you know that? How do you know what if they if they’re using their phone?

Nicole Guarino:
While you’re driving?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Well, it’s connected

Jon Johnson:
to the app. Connected to the app.

Josh Schachter:
To the car?

Nicole Guarino:
So you have the app downloaded on your phone. Everything is actually in the mobile device. We can actually tell not to go completely off subject. But if you got into a car accident and your airbags deployed, we can tell that from, the technology in your mobile phone.

Jon Johnson:
Wow. Because that’s awesome or terrifying. I’m I’m 5050 on that.

Nicole Guarino:
That is the AI and the algorithms talking. We can tell by the different, you know

Josh Schachter:
Whatever beepers they have in the phone. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. The impact and all that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Nicole Guarino:
The impact of the airbags going off, how it makes the change, with the phone. That’s huge. Of the all the sensors you have in the phone can pick them up. So we can definitely pick up distracted driving, and we can tell what kind of distracted driving events. We can tell whether you’re texting or we can tell all the different, distraction events

Jon Johnson:
on your phone.

Nicole Guarino:
We can also tell when it’s connected, and we can tell if you’re using it connected to your vehicle that you’re less likely to be as distracted as if you were using your actual mobile phone.

Josh Schachter:
That makes sense. Because

Jon Johnson:
you’re not Let me see if I could just kinda square the circle because, you know, I see a lot of ads for, you know, insurance companies that are saying, you know, download this app or, like, plug in this ODB 2 sensor or something like that. And then safe driving events will decrease your insurance rate. Is this kinda what we’re tying into where Yep. You have all of these things? Okay. They don’t hard brake. They’re not distracted driving, so they get this score every 90 days, and it helps, you know, their insurance rates. Is that kind of the thing that we’re talking about here?

Nicole Guarino:
Yeah. So that’s we are the technology, provider behind those. So yes.

Jon Johnson:
Got it.

Josh Schachter:
For 23 of the top 25 auto insurers in the US. Correct. Correct. And so so is that is that true or is that a false out there that you’re helping to save insurance rates for folks? Or are there some No.

Jon Johnson:
That’s true.

Josh Schachter:
People getting punished for for for driving

Jon Johnson:
Well, I’m sure that the opposite is also true. Then if you are doing those hard breaks, it it is one of those indicators of high risk. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Nicole Guarino:
But we’re using, we are I mean, it’s a lot of the r and d that we’re doing is really how do you use AI and chat GPT to think about how do you take all of this information and make it in a consumable form so that people can actually improve their driving behavior. So that’s kind of, like, on the forefront of the things that we’re thinking about.

Josh Schachter:
Yep. So you oversee the the CS team. Your team is around 16 folks. Is that correct? Yep. And and tell us

Jon Johnson:
a little bit how you

Nicole Guarino:
Since the last time we chatted, we have 2 new hires. Amazing. We added another segment of our team, but different role, but gonna be under the customer success belt under the technical account management. So we just hired for that as well. So we went from having 16 to 19 now, so that’s exciting.

Josh Schachter:
And and what’s the, like, what’s the composition of the team? How do you how do you structure keep the team structured?

Nicole Guarino:
So right now, we have obviously different levels of customer success managers. We have, you know, I would say, I guess, you know, the typical structure, like, CSM 1 to senior, and then we have, what we call our principal levels as individual contributors that, are more of our strategic CSMs. So I guess instead of calling them strategic, they’re principal here. And so we have different structures. So we have our VP. I’m the director. We have a couple senior managers, and then all of them have different levels of CSM. So right now, I’m managing the strategic team, of the principal levels, while we have some senior managers that are managing, like, customer success level ones and twos and some that are managing the senior

Josh Schachter:
CSM. So okay. And, well but I think your segmentation is you got a lot of big customers. Right? If you’ve got 23 of the 25 auto insurers in the US, sounds like like a a majority of your customers are enterprise strategic level that that you’re picking up?

Nicole Guarino:
We have a majority of strategic. And then if you think of internationally, we are hiring a customer success team in Europe. So we have a few customer success, CSMs in Europe. So one’s sitting in France. 1 is sitting we have a new hire we started a couple weeks ago, started in Italy. We’ve been looking in Spain and in Germany as well. So, we’re doing more hiring internationally. And then we have our APAC team.

Nicole Guarino:
So, we’re really working with, the world’s largest insurance companies in auto as well.

Josh Schachter:
Awesome. When you think now of of, you know, the end of this year and going into q one, what is a big rock that you’re pushing up the hill? What’s a major focus of your organization now?

Nicole Guarino:
Yeah. So for our organization, I mean, this is, I would say, probably typical, is making sure we’re hitting our revenue and growth goals. So we’re a private company, but we’re always making sure that we’re hitting 30% revenue growth, revenue goals, 30% program growth as well. My team is not responsible for revenue. So we because our clients, as you mentioned, they’re enterprise clients, we have a second so we only talked about our user based insurance product. We have a crashing claims product. And our crashing claims product is equally as big if and has the potential to be bigger than our flagship product. And so the enterprise deals with some of our secondary products are equally large.

Nicole Guarino:
Sales always stays on the account. So while they’re hunting for new revenue, our team is managing the day to day relationships. Our COO always likes to call our team the quarterback. We’re calling the plays. We know when to we know when to call sales back. We need to know when we need technical support. We know when we need to call in product or, our customer solutions teams. But, so for us, we’re constantly, as a company, driving towards those goals every year and making sure that we hit them because we typically hit them year over year or come if there’s a year we didn’t we didn’t hit 30% revenue, we hit 28, 29.

Nicole Guarino:
So we’re fairly close.

Josh Schachter:
And how about on your team? Like, yeah, first, specifically, how does that trickle down to you on the CS side?

Nicole Guarino:
So my team is really here for, like, program adoption and growth. So, like, my mind is always, like, if this was our, like, user goals that we have, end user goals for the year, what do they like, are we gonna hit those goals? Like, did we hit our forecast? I’m doing a lot of the work I’m doing is a lot of the forecasting work on are we hitting our forecast or we and what are we accounting for for future forecast for the next year? So I’m definitely if you’re thinking me in particular and my VP, we’re constantly thinking about how are we gonna hit those goals and which clients are more likely than not that we can influence to do more with their programs to grow.

Josh Schachter:
And have you thought about ways that you’re going to shape your programs to to help increase those goals?

Nicole Guarino:
Yeah. So we have best practices. We have playbooks that we deploy. And so I’m always looking every year to say what best practices have our customers adopted. And, like, working with those CSMs to say, what are the roadblocks of the best practices that they haven’t adopted? Like, why haven’t they? Is it a roadblock that you’re facing internally? Is it a road map like, is it a road map issue with some of your customers? Like, let’s figure out what the roadblocks are so that we can strategize on how to implement what we know would be a best practice for a customer.

Josh Schachter:
What what are they like what is it what’s the the the biggest best the best best practice that that correlates to a good customer and the roadblocks that that are faced in getting that to completion?

Nicole Guarino:
Yeah. So, I mean, we have a challenging product. Right? You just you called it you called it out in the very beginning. You said, like, hey, Big Brother’s watching you. And so, you know, we always have this hurdle, you know, with the end user adoption on, is it a good, like, is it a good like, do you did you set up your program in a way that an end user would, you know, want to use the program? So it’s like, are you scoring correctly? Does this make sense? You know, all of these little nuances. Like, are you setting up your, messaging with either push notifications or SMS appropriately to make sure that, you know, when iOS and, you know, Apple is throwing that pop up that says, hey. This app has been tracking you in the background x amount of times. Do you wanna always allow permissions? Most people automatically default only when using the app.

Jon Johnson:
Yep.

Nicole Guarino:
But the reality is if you’re gonna be in this program, it needs to be permission needs to be allowed all the time. So, like, what are some of the ways we can reach the end user to let them know, like, if you don’t take this action, you’re gonna lose your discount or you’re gonna lose your rating. And so it’s something that if you ever signed up for one of these programs, like, they don’t our our partners don’t do the best job of educating you on, like, what the consequences are or, like, how it actually works because think about it. If you, you know, call an 800 number to get insurance and they sold you insurance, they’re not gonna really sit down and tell you, like, hey. This is how this works. They wanna get you, like, on and off the call with a new policy as fast as possible. And so there’s a lot of things that if not communicated correctly, you know, you can lose the end user for adoption. And you also didn’t have the best experience with the insurance company if you got quoted a rate and suddenly it changed because you didn’t take the right permissions when you signed up for the program.

Josh Schachter:
So are you are you are you accessing those end users, the the customers of your customers directly?

Nicole Guarino:
We don’t unless it’s through push notification or SMS, in which case we’ve gotten permission to then with the messaging that they approve to say, like, these are the frequency of messages that you should send and the cadence in which you should send it, to make sure that you don’t lose, your end user to those, you know, to those sort of, like, I guess you could say, not a mistake, but just like a misinformation of what to do.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Got it. Well, the one quick question just, you know, you mentioned, you know, upsells and opportunity kinda gets passed back over to your sales team. Mhmm. What are some of the metrics that you’re tracking your CSMs on for success? Is it purely adoption? Is it program, you know, management? Walk me through some of those KPIs.

Nicole Guarino:
Yeah. So we have best practices. We have a ton of different initiatives. We know what’s been deployed and not been deployed. So we can see we track how many growth initiatives they launch quarterly yearly. The other thing is just we count what’s called, like, monthly active users. So it’s a mobile program. We know how many users we have monthly on the program and yearly on a program.

Nicole Guarino:
And so we track to make sure that, you know, if a customer was at a set number of users in the beginning of the year, we obviously wanna see x amount of growth from our customers. And so we’re tracking that user, growth metric with our CSMs. So we’re definitely program growth and, best practice growth initiatives, that we’re measuring for the CS team. That is not to say that the CS doesn’t do a majority of the heavy lifting. Right. When it comes to upsell and adoption, that has been widely and greatly debated around here because our team does too a lot of heavy lifting. But from a sales side, I totally understand why it stays with sales because at time of renewal, it’s always an opportunity to upsell and expand, into our customers, which is where sales really falls. And they do a good job of increasing revenue that way.

Josh Schachter:
John, what do you think about that? Where do you land on that, perennial debate of shell CS renew or not renew? Hey, everybody. It’s Josh. I’m taking a quick break from the podcast to tell you a bit about UpdateAI. I started UpdateAI to solve 2 major challenges for CS teams. The first is that we save CSMs 4 to 5 hours per week with our productivity through AI. Secondly, we give leaders a window into all the conversations across each account and the entire portfolio. So we help knowledge transfer, we help increase the coverage model of your CS teams, and we help you detect emerging patterns in what your customers are telling your CSMs across all the risks, product feedback, advocacy moments, and expansion opportunities. So come check us out at www.updateai.

Josh Schachter:
It’s completely free to sign up and trial. John, what do you think about that? Where do you land on that, perennial debate of shell CS renew or not renew?

Jon Johnson:
I think it depends on what product lines look like upon growth. Like, if you have one product in 15 that customers aren’t using, I think if there’s, like, a very natural transition to say, I’m gonna add this module and I’m gonna add this module, makes a lot of sense for sales to kinda be brought in to work through, you know, infrastructure, you know, process alignment. For ones that kinda sit more like on the usage side, which is what my company is where it’s very much just like we’re gonna buy a bundle and then we drive usage to buy a bigger bundle. We’re very integrated in monthly active usage and, you know, yearly users. That is the something that I’m really passionate about is saying, I’m doing all the work. I’m digging I’m digging these trenches right, and I’m filling it in with the customers. I wanna be I wanna part of that.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. A slice of that pie. I kinda feel the same way, in that in that situation.

Jon Johnson:
It makes

Josh Schachter:
like like you said, that makes a lot of sense. John, I’ve never actually gotten as much value from from your specific utterance of yours.

Jon Johnson:
It’s been 2 years.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. But that’s like, in that very that was a very efficient, use of your of your time there, that with, like, very, like, multivariate product lines, it makes sense to have sales come in to educate on new opportunities. But if it’s just about usage and and renewing and expanding the existing, then it should be CS.

Jon Johnson:
Well, that’s also the difference between product led and sales led growth too. So, I mean, there’s there’s very much, like, alignment between how the industry and how the market is growing in these spaces. So

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. Nicole, where do you we don’t want you to cross any picket lines here, but where do

Jon Johnson:
you sit on this on this

Josh Schachter:
on this debate, or not debate, consideration, let’s say, of the roles.

Nicole Guarino:
Yeah. I’m debating on who’s gonna be listening to this, podcast.

Jon Johnson:
I just believe it out. It’s fine. Yeah.

Nicole Guarino:
I’m I mean, I came from sales. So a lot of this work, I’ve kind of initiated and have let’s just say, I’ve teed up a lot for our sales team in the past. And so it’s been bittersweet, I guess you could say, where I’m, like, not reaping the reward that sales has had. However, having been in sales married to a salesperson in tech, like, I do respect the fact that you take a lot of risk in that role, and it’s definitely nobody wants to sign up for it, having the revenue number over your head. So it’s like, if you’re not gonna sign up for the risk at the same time, you know, it’s hard to reap the rewards too. So I

Jon Johnson:
just wanna go to sales club. That’s it. That’s all I care about. Like, I just need I

Nicole Guarino:
yeah. I agree. I just want the vacation.

Jon Johnson:
That’s it. That’s it.

Nicole Guarino:
But yeah. Like I said, I I don’t know. I’ve always said because like I said, I’ve I’ve worked in both roles and they’re both hard. I’m based from my perspective, it’s like pick the poison you’re comfortable with, I guess, when you’re in a client facing role.

Jon Johnson:
Well, I think this is actually one of those things that you and I could probably spend a lot of time, like, probably arguing over is what what revenue is important to the business. Yeah. Right? And I think it really does depend on, like, industry. It depends on segment. It depends on all of these things. But in the current model, the net new and the current owned revenue are equally important. And if we’re not reaping the same rewards, while there is less risk as a CSM when it comes to just base salary and and performance and longevity of that, the revenue that CSMs own is, if not more, but equally important to the revenue that that sales comes in. And I think what I hear from most folks that come from the sales org is, like, oh, well, that’s harder.

Jon Johnson:
They get all of the big bonuses and the big payouts and the big they get the watches and the steak dinners and the Porsche experience, and it’s, like, but you’re you’re just a CSM. Right? And we get this we’re just kinda, like, fighting through a little bit of this of, like, yeah, but this is, like, a legitimate profession too. And it’s a lot better these days, but I do hear a lot of folks that come out of sales that just don’t necessarily see owned revenue as exciting as, like, that net new kind of high that you get.

Nicole Guarino:
John, I actually would I totally agree with you. I don’t think we would argue here. I do think I’ve come from CS experience in a real SaaS world, and I would say the difference between what we do now is that we are really bespoke. And because we are bespoke like, in a SaaS world, if it ever went back to sales, I probably wouldn’t work there. I would feel like, no. I’m doing all this work. I’m keeping it, and it’s mine. But I think for here, it does make sense because it is a very bespoke product.

Nicole Guarino:
We have a mobile product. We have an IoT device that we’re selling as well. So we’re building our own IoT devices. We have a we have a white label mobile app, but we have customized mobile apps. And so we live in a very we are a tech company that we are a SaaS company, but the reality is is that we’re very, we’re very much of a spoke, technology company. And because of that, I do understand, with the amount of revenue, like, the size of our actual revenue deals are massive. And so I can understand where you’re not gonna be managing to the day to day if you have this massive enterprise deal that you’re chasing after from one of your clients.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah.

Nicole Guarino:
And so that split seems to make sense here because we’re not, like, they’re not, like, you know, a 50, $100,000 deal, like, for an upsell. They’re, like, 1,000,000 of dollars when we’re looking at upsells. And so I do understand, you know, why the decisions have been made to make sure you keep sales in the process.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. And the structure of the deal is also, like, a very important component. So I I I’m with you on that. I think I think we did find consensus here before.

Nicole Guarino:
Yeah. But I no. I totally agree. I mean Yeah. I actually Depending on who listens to this, I’m really, like, I’m biting my tongue because I’ve

Jon Johnson:
done a ton of

Nicole Guarino:
work here.

Jon Johnson:
And Josh and I tend to agree on this too. Like, not so much, like, we need to kill CS, but, I mean, this idea that, like, CS and sales are completely separate and like, we’re all revenue. Like, whether we own the renewal or whether we talk about upsells, like, this is the revenue org. Right? This is where we’re at. And, I really love it when teams work well together. And and I don’t just mean from, like, the the IC standpoint, but from a leadership standpoint to say, there is no such thing as post sales. It’s just pre renewal. Like Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Everything is working towards that renewal from the kickoff with the sales to the hand off to CS and then that renewal event. Who owns it? Yeah. That can be dependent. But if we get this mindset of that this is just one trajectory getting to renewal, then sales is gonna win and CS is gonna win and leadership isn’t gonna say, why are my children fighting? Right?

Nicole Guarino:
Yeah. I can actually say, like, our sales and CS team, this is the first organization, and it probably it took it it took a little bit where I had to when I I was actually the 1st CS hire. And so, there was a lot from sales that I have to be like, yeah. This is not your job. It’s mine now. This is why I’m here, so I’m taking it. Thanks. It’s mine.

Nicole Guarino:
And, also, you’re not gonna seal the glory of the work that I’ve done because I’ve done it. Yeah. But I will say this has been the most collaborative sales team that I’ve ever worked with. It’s, like, truly a partnership. We’re super collaborative. Of course, like, you know, it’s every it’s like every sibling relationship where you have bumps in the road, but at the end of the day, we have a great collaboration. I don’t think there’s ever been a time that I’ve worked here where I thought, oh, I cannot believe CS sold them. Like, not CS.

Nicole Guarino:
I can’t believe sales sold this, and now I have to fix

Jon Johnson:
Right.

Nicole Guarino:
This issue. And you you know this. I don’t have to tell you this. I’m sure to both of you, but you’ve all have probably worked with salespeople that oversold. And then when it gets to see us, you have to, you know, roll back that messaging. And so you’re left holding the bag of what was overpromised, and now you’re gonna under deliver where that happens all the time. And you just think, why is sales doing this to us? You’re making our lives difficult. I’ve never actually had that here.

Nicole Guarino:
So Why

Josh Schachter:
do you think that is? What do you think is in place that

Jon Johnson:
makes it afraid of you, Nicole.

Nicole Guarino:
No. I actually I always say they hired salespeople that I feel, like, could be good CS people. And it’s interesting. I it’s funny. My VP just told me I did 61 interviews so far this year, in terms of hiring. So spent a lot of time interviewing. And I feel like the people that I’ve been interviewing for in this role is, like, there’s obviously very much like the CS typical skill that I’m looking for, but I always like to have that person that innately can sell by being consultants. And Yeah.

Nicole Guarino:
I think our sales team are very consultative sellers.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. That’s great.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Good. Nicole, we’re gonna leave it at that. This was great. It was awesome to hear about what you guys are doing. I love the the the the pure mission behind helping to create safer drivers and better driver behavior and Yeah. Some of the insight that you guys get from your, just, I don’t know, terabytes and terabytes of data or whatever whatever

Nicole Guarino:
That’s so much.

Jon Johnson:
What’s the bigger word? I don’t know.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Googles of data.

Nicole Guarino:
I think that would blow your mind on how much, trip processing we do here.

Josh Schachter:
I can’t even imagine. And and next time, let’s talk about some of the AI because I’m sure there’s some really cool AI stuff that your team is working on.

Nicole Guarino:
Yeah. We’re doing some pretty awesome stuff on the end user, AI journey.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. But thank you so much. And, as your team grows, yeah, of course, your team’s growing and you guys are are rocking and rolling. So, best of luck as we head into next year.

Jon Johnson:
Yep. Thank you, Nicole.